o9/o9 of the highrise illustrations.

and that's that. taken from the very last bit of the book where laing, having weathered the process of decay and degeneration, looks on as the process starts anew in the neighbouring highrise.

gosh, j.g ballard sure knew how to write a jolly yarn. but all snarky comments aside, this was a damn good book. if your itching for something a little icky and feeling particularly cynical about man kind, this'll go down a treat.

yeaaaaaaah, those unintelligible yellow blobs in the other building are _meant_ to be torch lights but i think someone had lost the will to put any effort into this by that point. shame on me.

o8/o9 of the high rise illustrations.

ugh. so many dead people

o7/o9 of the high rise illustrations.

of all the dark, uncomfortable moments in that book, this one practically h chokes itself on the cake. we've been following wilder's obsessive accent up the high rise and watched him degenerate along with the ever more decrepit scenery. by the time he finally makes it to the top, he's regressed to little more than a child. he's not the only one up there though- a tribe of knife wielding women have taken up residence in the roof garden and made habit of decorating it with the left overs of tenants who've wondered up there only to be butchered and eaten.

when we last see wilder, he's toddling towards the flock of eager harpies, having mistaken them for his 'new mothers'.

shudder.

o6/o9 of the high rise illustrations featuring yet more characters with increasingly tenuous grips on reality.

OH HAI! ROBERT LAING'S SUITCAST IT APPARANTLY MADE FROM SOME SUPER-SPACE-AGED-LIGHT-BEANDING SUBSTANCE!

o5/o9 of the high rise illustrations.

hmmm, i don't think sloppy even begins to cover the colouring style. but yeah. the sequence where royal's embracing his inner eccentric recluse and hanging with the birds was one of those ones that really got the grey matter ticking.

ASSESSMENT TODAY! WOO AND YAY!

o4/o9 of the high rise illustrations.

everything about this drawing is SO FUCKING LAZY.

NEXT!

dear alex,

please stop being so OCD when it comes to uploading things here.

PAH! that's what post labels are for!

anyhoo, o3/o9 of the high rise illustrations. woo and yay for potentially homicidal high society socialites. mmmmMMM. i dug this scene where laing goes out onto the roof, accidentally blundering into a party being held there and becomes unable to shake the clawing suspicion that the social x-rays are going to send him pavement diving. very the-big-wheel-scene from the third man.

in fact, the book is made up from a whole load of super tense moments where you just know horrific shit is just inches away from going down.

o2/o9 of the high rise illustrations.

boy that composition is tight? too tight? despite these images being pretty tiny irl, someone thought it would be a super hot idea to draw them to scale so they wouldn't have to fart around in photoshop when it was all said and done. that defiantly ended up biting me in the ass here, resulting in one _super_ cramped drawing.

also, if you think these images are dark, you should have seen them once they were printed out. muuuuuuurrrky.

01/09 of the final illustrations for the high rise project.

i had this super grand plan that i was going to to reflect the degeneration of the three main characters over the course of the story in the drawing style. totally kicking myself for not following up on that.

for the book illustration project. holy cow. in terms of organisation this blog is an ocd suffer's nightmare.

uuuuuuuugh. this cover is sliced white bread on paper. i could totally pussy out and claim that i was working on a much more detailed, refined and overall pimp version on the desktop that was stolen a couple of days before the deadline when the house got raided...

a smidgen of the piddly amount of research i did for the highrise project.

god, do i love those buildings round the barbican. they're just so delightfully soulless and monolithic and there's just _SO MUCH_ going on with them.

...being able to draw a straight line would really help when it comes to psychotic architecture.

more cover thumbnails, where in you act like you know something about graphic design!

so very, very tempted by the one of the guy going for a little pavement diving but yeah, not terribly universal. it's an ittsy-bittsy, teeny-weeny part of the book and not all that integral (other than hinting that things are going to hell in a handbag rather sharpish and illustrating the despondency of the high-rise residents). oh well.


in other news, i think we're off to see 2012 tonight. i'm praying for a shit-fest.

gggggoooOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIETNAM!

more stuff from the current project they've got us working on. since all the interior illustrations are all VERY character-centric, i wanted the cover to have something to do with the setting. besides, something like that seemed more all-encompasing than blah blah blah blah.

that first design is total milk toast. maybe it could have been worked into something a little more interesting.... but we'll never know since it's totally getting blown off in favour of the 'HO SHIT PERSPECTIVE!' idea.

albeit with slightly nicer lettering, obviously.

sketch book work for the current project. mmmm. messy, messy thumbnails.

but yeah, when it came to it, i found the scenes featuring royal were the ones i was itching to jump to right off the bat. i think i might have a thing for drawing snobby, aloof types.

hoy hoy.

our current project's to do 6 pages worth of illustration + cover for a book of our (limited) choice. here are some INCREDIBLY rough (and quite possibly plagiaristastic) thumbnails for the latter. i was really digging that first one too till i realized i'd just subconsciously re-hashed the cover for michale chambon's the escapist.

currently working on a cleaner version of the twin towers nod.
...
huzzah for originality!